WWE Survivor Series [GBA]

So, after wrestling took a two year break on the Game Boy Advance, all THQ managed to do was take its existing (and admittedly solid) GBA title Road to Wrestlemania X8, switch out its roster for a more updated line-up of wrestlers, shift in a new game structure, and call it Survivor. It wouldn't have been so bad had the game at least been updated even just a little, but even the weird little design quirks of the original game have remained intact, including some overlooked issues that make it possible to beat certain matches in mere seconds. The overall production is still a better than average wrestler, but Survivor just drops a ranking for simply being recycled product.

Features

• 16 wrestlers
• Five wrestling venues
• Cartridge save (one slot)
• Link cable support for four players (multiple cartridges)

For THQ's third wrestling go-round on the Game Boy Advance, the company offers up a "rivalry" of sorts between Raw and Smackdown, giving players the ability to assume the role of a character in either league and work their way through the rankings by fighting and becoming more popular, with the popularity ranking simply coming from the player's ability to utilize every single move in that wrestler's arsenal...and winning the match. There are 16 wrestlers to choose from, including John Cena, The Undertaker, Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, Rey Mysterio, Eddie Guerrero, Randy Orton, and Shawn Michaels, as well as Rob Van Dam, Kurt Angle, Triple H, Kane, Chavo Guerrero, Christian, John Cena, Edge, and Booker T, and like the last THQ wrestler there's a huge assortment of venues and options to play.

The foundation for Survivor Series is definitely a sound one, as Natsume reused that nifty little engine from Road to Wrestlemania X8 that pieces together body parts together to form a wrestler's entire form. Head, arms, legs, and torsos are actually independent sprites that, when attached together, gives the developer the ability to manipulate these bigger sprites like paper dolls. This technique gives Survivor, and Road to Wrestlemania before it, initially a strange look and feel, but overall offers up a better variety of moves for the assortment of characters in the game since they're not pre-drawn figures.

But even with this "technology" it doesn't entirely live up to its potential. Most of the wrestlers more or less have the same walk cycles, basic idle and injured antimation, and, more importantly, they share the identical sets of moves, with the exception of the character's finishing move performed when the special meter fills up. The artwork drawn for each character is also cloned between characters, so most of the characters end up looking the same as well; the only way to tell the difference between them is the head that's used to represent that wrestler...and in many cases, it's drawn at such a low resolution -- and long-haired wrestlers tend to have a buzz-cut due to the sprite truncating -- that it's sometimes difficult to tell apart, say, Christian and Randy Orton.

And, of course, the real problem is that, other than the new roster of wrestlers for the Raw/Smackdown pairing, the game plays identically to Road to Wrestlemania X8. Right down to the predictable AI which makes the game incredibly easy to beat the computer opponents. The only slight alteration is the game's requirement of getting popularity up during the Story Mode, which means players will have to work a LOT of different moves in their venue before pinning the foe...otherwise the ranking will be too low to move on. The game's Over the Top Rope way of winning is still incredibly flawed, a mistake in design from the last game that returns unaddressed in Survivor Series; throwing someone over the ring is a simple matter of grappling, tossing them to the ropes and nailing them in a run. The way Natsume avoids this in Survivor Series: Over the Top Rope rarely shows up in single player Story Mode.

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